Meet the Swedish newspaper editor who put an algorithm in charge of his homepage – Storybench

About four years ago, Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s top newspapers, was in free fall. The paper was experiencing depressed circulation, no digital revenue, and dwindling readership. When Fredric Káren took the job as editor-in-chief in 2013, the message from the board and the parent company, Scandinavian media conglomerate Schibsted Group, was clear: “Something radical had to be done to secure the newspaper’s future,” he recalls. Since then, SvD has gotten back on track by bringing a digital-first mentality into the newsroom. Káren talks a lot about how investing heavily in technology allowed the paper to move forward and regain profitability. Mostly, though, he says he owes the paper’s recovery to one thing: an algorithm that runs the news.